We know Ayaneo for their gaming handhelds, which offer formidable competition to Valve’s popular Steam Deck device. Of course, they make all sorts of other electronic devices, too, including mini-PCs and all sorts of computing accessories. The Ayaneo AG01 is another one of those many accessories.
Billed as a “starship graphics dock,” it’s an external GPU system that you can use to easily add discrete graphics to low-powered laptops and desktops. Why the “starship” label? Well, because the darn thing has a housing they describe as “inspired by the romantic era of space exploration,” which is a fancy way of saying they wanted it to look like a starship straight out of science-fiction.
The Ayaneo AG01 isn’t just a housing that you can equip with your choice of graphics cards. Instead, it’s a fully-built enclosed system with an integrated GPU, which means they customized it specifically for one card, so swapping in a different one from a different manufacturer isn’t likely to get the job done. In fact, they don’t even use a desktop GPU, as it houses an AMD Radeon RX 7600M XT GPU chip with its own custom board and cooling, so you’re stuck with AMD’s reasonably good RDNA 3 card for 1080p gaming.
To the unfamiliar, this GPU chip comes with 32 compute units, 64 Render Output Units (ROPs), 2,048 stream processors, and 8GB of DDR6 storage. It uses just 120W of power, so this graphics card is going to be pretty light on the juice. There’s an internal fan with air vents at various areas for active cooling.
The Ayaneo AG01 gets all the usual GPU output ports, so there are two DisplayPort 2.0 slots and two HDMI 2.1 ports for hooking up multiple monitors. You can connect it to your PC via the USB 4 Type C slot, which is compatible with both Thunderbolt 3 and 4. Other ports include an OcuLink port that you can use instead of the USB-C port, an RJ45 port for a wired LAN connection, and a USB-A slot for plugging in USB accessories. Inside, there’s also an M2 connector for loading an SSD on the device, the compartment for which can be accessed from a bottom door that opens without any tools for easy installation.
The external GPU system is pretty compact, coming in at a size that can easily make room on top of a small desktop (heck it can sit on top of a mini-PC) or right next to a laptop. It comes in two choices of color schemes, namely nebula red and interstellar gray. We’re most fond of the second variant, which comes in shades of gray, similar to the usual colors you’ll see starships using in movies and shows. Other details include an RGB light ring on top, a customizable name plate, and a hardwearing metal body.
The Ayaneo AG01 is part of a number of products the outfit unveiled during their Ayaneo Remake product launch. No word on pricing or release date, but we expect it to arrive sometime in the year.
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